“... Four hospitals – Walsall Manor in the West Midlands; the North Middlesex in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring ...”

“... without ever dominating this third volume as the wonderful letters Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet dominated the second. The hectic and intrusive Colet is by this date gone from Flaubert’s life, a ‘bonne Muse’ no longer requiring to be fended off by letter but sacrificed once and for all to the autonomy of Work. She resurfaces only in her ...”

“... my first proper books’, and persuaded his father to take him to the Natural History Museum in London. There he was struck by ‘all the variety and surprise and difference’ of the guillemot’s eggs. Perhaps it was that feeling, I now thought, which I had really been searching for – and which I had found – in the primary rain forest in the heart of ...”

“... the third person): Rather glad he came back – speech apparently immense success. Elsa Maxwell in London. Very bored with everything except his Cim. Cimmie: I am so glad we are like we are and not just ordinary hus and wife. Tom: Last night very amusing dinner party of about 20. Viola Tree funnier than you would believe. A new stunt – ‘learning to ...”

“... blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him ...”

“... in counter-insurgency policing. They and the five hundred or so others like them at work in London represent a formal tradition of secret political policing which is almost as old as the institution of organised policing itself in Britain. Modern political policing began on Saint Patrick’s Day 1883, when four CID men and eight uniformed officers were ...”

“... to save his country, and at the same time get his debts paid? And perhaps Mr Pitt, plotting in London, thought it was Whitehall’s revolution; the opportunity to destabilise, embarrass and disable the old enemy could not be let slip, and if a bribe here and there could do it, he would be glad to have some revolutionaries in England’s pocket. Later, in ...”

“... us. We never considered the stuff on our plates; we thought the school milk came on a lorry from London. Never for a second did my friends and I think of ourselves as coming from a rural community; like all British suburban kids, we lived as dark, twinkling fallout from a big city, in our case Glasgow; and we thought carports and breezeblocks were part of ...”

“... September atrocity at the Munich Olympics), intense snapshots of his youth as a tyro journalist in London, and a long, opaque adulthood of apparent failure and disappointment. This makes for a book that is less annoying, less posturing, than the one he would probably have written in 1982. Penman now reserves particular admiration for what can seem the ...”

“... these cities stood. I listed butterflies, and the names of Napoleonic marshals, and shirtmakers in London, in Paris, in Venice. When on a journey I had, as a matter of singular urgency, to list in what became a succession of small red notebooks the names of the places we went through, often with a pencil that went blunt when I needed it most, I learned out of ...”

“... against any civil or criminal proceedings’ to the state and all its functionaries. Lawyers in London working with the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front and the Cradock Residents Association issued a statement to alert the international community: the South African government’s failure to contain the people’s anger, they said, had ‘given rise to ...”

“... I work in mixed media. Gagosian’s doing my next show.) It has not escaped my notice that even in London at the very centre of the intellectual cosmos – the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place – there’s a rubber-stamp shop right next door. Titillating to admit, but as local surveillance cameras would no doubt ...”

“... with Wilson as editor. A similar inspiration had lain behind the establishment of the Criterion in London twenty years earlier with T.S. Eliot as editor, and Wilson clearly hankered after a pulpit that would possess undisputed literary authority in even the most intellectually serious quarters. The income from such a position would have been handy, too: in ...”

“... attention to the inhuman scale of medicine and to the ever-dimming hope of personal care. A big London hospital in 1800 might have done a couple of hundred operations a year: the Mayo Clinic in 1924 did almost 24,000 with nearly 400 doctors and 900 other workers in its employ. Of course, 20th-century surgery is infinitely superior to its cottage-industry ...”

“... sets up a bland opposition between a salt-of-the-earth heroine – based perhaps on Louise Michel or Anne-Marie Menand, another stalwart of the barricades – and the powdered lackeys of reaction. The class-sympathies of the poem do not ring true and the dialectic is a parody of more complex feelings elsewhere in the work about change and ...”